Mevolent has returned- no one knows how- and he's raising an army. With Valkyrie Cain and Skulduggery Pleasant out of the picture, it's up to the minions of Blogland to either stop him... Or join him.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Arachne Basilisk and Springheeled Jack: Strangers in the Bedroom and Dead Generals

She decided to overlook the fact that B-J was with them. The girl was so easily led astray, and still valuable for spy material. If she knew anything they knew, they could get it out of her with a sensitive in her sleep. Simple. The Child of the Spider instead turned her attentions to the two men who had been stupid enough to enter her room. Before speaking, she had grabbed a sheet off the bed and was holding it in front of her. "What a lovely surprise. Ravel and Vex walking in on me getting dressed."
Ravel didn't turn, just closed his eyes and hit his head on the wall. For some reason, Vex did turn. It was a bit of a reflex to hearing the voice, he guessed, but did it have to wait until she'd spoken about dressing before kicking in? Her frown deepened and he raised his hands in a mock surrender.
"Terribly sorry. We didn't realise. We'll just be going then..."
B-J got the door open. "GUARDS!!!" The traitorous Arachne shrieked at the top of her voice. Things were really not going well.

-----

It was getting light now. Jack slunk through the darkness in the less densely populated corridors, having taken out the guards. Even he felt going after the main generals on this team was a little too much, so he was going after the sub-generals. Those lower than Serpine. Arachne Basilisk was currently calling attention to herself, he could hear her from where he crouched beside the office of another of the 'sub-generals'. Basilisk, Sunshine, Hazardous, Trilby, Hauter and Electrolytic. The office of Hazardous was empty. There were voices from inside Sunshine's office, indicating someone else was there. Trilby's office sounded empty but for an irritating slurp of coffee. A phone rang, playing some nasty song by some tone-deaf singer. Trilby muttered something about changing that ringtone before answering and promptly complaining that escaped prisoners were not his problem and that he was in charge of a certain group of people, none of which had guard duty until Sunday. The door opened slowly, but Trilby was pretty busy with his phone call and the pile of deep fried chocolate things and tower of doughnuts. He honestly didn't see the thing that was Jack sneaking up on him until it was too late. Jack left the man and his snapped, stuffed neck limp at the desk.

Electrolytic put up more of a fight. He was in the halls, wearing down his thumbs on some old handheld game. He seemed to have good reflexes. Without looking up, he charged himself and shot a bolt of electricity at Jack. Even so, he still looked like a little kid. "Very funny, Carmichael. Try not coming from the left all the damn time." That was when Jack spotted the blind right eye. Stupid files. They had given him files on each Mage he had to take down, but there was a lot left out about Electrolytic. "Carmichael?" Of course, Jack wasn't Carmichael Hauter, and when Benedict Electrolytic began to turn, he had already leapt to his blind side. The brunette sorcerer frowned and went back to his game, which was acting a little strange after the previous charge up. He slapped the game and cursed, a lump of chewed up gum falling out of his mouth.

Benedict may have been half-blind, but a direct result was his paranoia. He thought he could feel something and he ducked and twirled away as Jack reached for him. He dropped his game, charged his arms and fired twin bolts of electricity. Jack flipped up, over and aimed a kick for the adept's head.

That was stupid, he scolded himself after as he went to look for the last three. The shock from slamming into someone charged with electricity was over now, but he was still a bit jittery. And Benedict was dead. Carmichael Hauter walked right into him, apologised, went around, stopped, did a double take and got his neck broken by one of Jack's powerful kicks. He paused outside the next office. He was back at Sunshine's office and there were still two voices. The door wasn't closed properly so he was able to knock it a little ajar and saw Esra and a blonde girl. Not Hazardous, then. An unknown girl. Obviously quite close to Esra since they were kissing quite passionately. Esra spotted him and slowly pushed the girl away, raising himself to his feet and walking towards the door, grabbing something off the table. Then he charged and Jack jumped over him, turning just as the Mage turned to redirect his charge. The blonde sorceress just watched them from the bench, a bored expression on her face.

Esra had faster reactions than Electrolytic did, and faster than Jack thought he would. He could duck, weave and jab so that neither could lay a hand on each other. When Jack finally hit him, it sent the Mage stumbling in front of the blonde girl. Jack went for a kick which would hopefully break his neck, but he moved out the way...

...and the girl's neck was broken instead...

Esra stared in shock, suddenly frozen to the spot, staring at the body of his girlfriend. "M-Midnight?" The body of Midnight True slumped to the ground and Esra was charging again, grabbing Jack and slamming him against the chest Cadence had sat on before when she had come to talk to him. The chest lit up and Jack cried out as his flesh began to sizzle. He wrapped his powerful legs around Esra's waist and flipped him head first into the wall. Once he was free, he fled.

-----

B-J had gotten away. Arachne had wanted B-J to get away, but Vex and Ravel had been detained. Heck, Ravel suffered so badly from arachnophobia that he was practically frozen to the spot when Arachne had first regurgitated spiders before him. She found it rather amusing when Vex had tried to drag him away. B-J had tried to get rid of some of the spiders with fire and Vex had joined in with his own energy blasts. Only then the guards came and they dragged each other out, but the guards let B-J through and when she realised, it was too late...

Arachne followed the guards back down to the cells, making note of the new bodies of guards littering the halls and of the fact Vehemence's body had not been moved yet. Ravel glared back at her. "You were supposed to be on our side."
"No. No, I wasn't. There is no 'supposed to'. There is only which side I am on and which side I pretend to be on. Good day, Erskine." He glared at her as she left.
"This is why the Children of the Spider are untrustworthy." Dexter mumbled. Erskine glared at him.
"Not all of them."
There was an awkward silence. "You like Madame Mist, don't you?" Dexter teased.
"Now is hardly the time or the place to-"
"Oh my God, you love Madame Mist!"
"I do not!"
"That is actually so cute, Erskine!"
"I do not have a crush on Madame Mist."
"Hey, I never said the word 'crush'..."
"Stop it."
"Not until I've helped you two get together forever."
"Never gonna happen."
"But it'd be so cute! You'd love it!"
"Have you not noticed the situation we are in?"
"Quit changing the subject! You're just annoyed because I know your secret crush."
"Dexter, if this continues I will kill you. Very violently. With your own arm."
"Ravel and Mist, sitting in a tree-"
"I will tear your arm off and use it to claw your eyes out, which I will then shove down your throat while I beat you to death with the jagged end of your arm."
"-K-I-S-S-I-N-G-"
"And then I'll skin you and turn you into a suitcase."
"Oh my God! I just imagined what your children would look like!"
"Dexter..."
"You have to have kids. Name one after me!"
"Then I will get your bones and turn them into hundreds of little statuettes as souvenirs for visiting...some tourist attraction or another...maybe I'll make the site of your death a tourist attraction..."
Dexter laughed. "Okay, okay, I'll shut up now. No need to be so...macabre."

10 comments:

This is the BEST!!! I totally ship this now! I'll start planning the wedding this evening... Also, I quite enjoy your fight scenes! Have I said this before? I don't know. Well, anyway, your chapters are always great fun to read. Keep it up! (seriously, though, can we have an MC wedding for them? After Mevolent is dead? Or we could have one in the secret underground resistance if Mevolent wins)

Oh my God! I would love to actually have a wedding for them! IT MUST BE DONE!!! *pushes B-J to Friendzone City*

*Gasp!* At the end of last year fight scenes were one of the things I was worst at writing, right down there with romance only fics and poetry. I feel this collab has really helped me in that regard. I LOVE YOU MEVOLENT COLLAB!!!

Wow- in that case, you've definitely improved a lot. Personally, since I'm training to become an instructor in Krav Maga, I'm picky about fight scenes, but I can visualize yours easily and they make tons of logical sense. Some people make characters do things they wouldn't normally do, either for the sake of their plot or in order to have a certain character win. You don't do any of that, though, so congratulations, and thanks for writing great scenes!

I'm a stickler about being contextually accurate, so if I make a character act too OOC I end up being all 'I hate this, I wish I'd never written it' blah-d-bla-d-blah...which has happened about once with SP writing...when I first introduced Vex to this collab and then much later realised he was an adept, not an elemental...

I try and post one new thing a day, but sometimes thanks to things like the Bernard Sult storyline which was originally only meant to be one chapter, I occasionally post two things in one day...which is fun.

and I think the general update speed of everyone else has slowed down since I first joined, which is good because I don't feel as pressured to keep up with my updates anymore and can devote more time to writing my book (or I could if my memory stick hadn't sprouted wings and flown off) or doing homework or preparing for exams, because now I feel I can have a day with no updates...this collab also eats into my updates for FF.Net followers...which is a problem because it is therefore eating into my new years resolution...but the problem is this story is thrilling and now it's also unpredictable for me...and all my FF.Net fics are carefully planned out but I have no idea how to word anything and I need fillers because it's all too short and uneventful...

It's true, the update speed has definitely slowed down- in my mind this is both good and bad... Well, really just good. I just get concerned that the project is dying if nobody posts for 24 hours, but that's just because I'm weirdly obsessed with this. Every. Spare. Minute. That I own is dedicated to writing/plotting for this blog. And some minutes are technically not 'spare'... Many are stolen from bedtime, others from free periods at school when I should be doing homework. My problem is the same as yours- this story is thrilling. But my writing is always unpredictable, despite all the time I spend plotting- in the end my characters just do whatever the heck they were going to do anyway. <3